Which finder view do you prefer? Personaly I like Icon View for my Applications folder and my Pictures folder because I recognize the icon before the name. And because of that I started using Icon View all around. But I have heard many people say is sucks, so I was wondering what you all used.

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I hardly ever use Finder to access my apps. I either use QuickSilver or Himmelbar as an app launcher. I usually access my photos through iPhoto '06. For day-to-day access to my files I use column view when I think of the folder structure, and to further drill down, I use either list view for non-image (text or binary) files, or icon view for files that have an actual icon image (of course, with show preview enabled in view options (Command-j)). The latter is not for my photos, but for the artwork and videos I created.

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Like you, often Icon view is the fastest, I spot an apps icon or in the case of documents it's easy to see a particular set of icons quickly. It can also show more than the other two, simply by using the entire space. I find that after spending most of my OS9 days in outline view and moving to column view when OSX came, I have returned to Icon view as my principal interaction. But I do use the others too.

I find Outline view to be great for sorting by whatever, name, date, size...

I find column view to be good for navigating and moving around.

Path Finder made Icon view more useful by having things like the breadcrumbs trail showing where you are in the disks structure, Leopard looks like it'll reproduce that.

It is amazing how much things can change. I am now always using column mode, even to the point that whenever I am using a friend's comp, I switch the view. I don't know what caused me to change, but I have been in column mode for a long time now.

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I'd really like to use icon view just to see all that nice eye candy, but I've been using column view almost exclusively for years now just because it's the most convenient and usually the quickest way to get to something. I use Butler to lauch apps, so I very rarely need to rummage around in the apps folder. I'm usually keyed in on my downloads, documents, music or videos.

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If I'm just casually browsing or looking for a particular file, then I use icon view, but if i need to get some real work done, moving lots of files etc, then Column view is the way to go .... and I don't think I've ever used coverflow yet.

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I prefer icon view because I think its the easiest to navigate view. If I don't want to browse by name or icon then I use coverflow, but I think that generally coverflow isn't very convient for browsing in finder.